


The Collector

by sipjackerryjuice



Category: Tales from the Gas Station
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, I guess attempted suicide?, M/M, NSFW, No Smut, VOLUME THREE SPOILERS, but it won’t make sense if you haven’t read it, but tw there’s mention of suicide, jackxjerry, jerk, well I guess it’s not really spoilers?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:12:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26170192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sipjackerryjuice/pseuds/sipjackerryjuice
Summary: [AU] Jack is beyond horrified when he discovers he knows The Collector all too well.
Relationships: Jack/Jerry (Tales From the Gas Station)
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Collector](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26165902) by [iiStarnet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iiStarnet/pseuds/iiStarnet). 



> I don’t have any angsty fics in my repertoire, so here you go ahahaha  
> This is basically a sister fic to iistarnet!  
> We were talking in Pain Gravy about what would happen if certain people were the Collector instead of who actually was the Collector in canon!  
> Go check them out, give them some love!  
> If you liked it, leave a comment or kudos!  
> Thanks for reading!  
> \- sara 
> 
> p.s. if Jack sees this, give us canon jackxjerry pls I beg

The climb wasn’t so bad. Forcing my body not to shiver as I lay on the ground, tangled in tall grass and covered beneath my garbage cape was another story altogether. The monsters were close, in the back of the moving truck with Rita. Now that she was gone and locked away, I could barely see a thing. But I could make out the two dark silhouettes standing on my side of the truck. One was Spencer. The other was lean and nearly as tall as him. Long hair, thin legs. Some sort of dress on. It was clearly a woman. She was annoyed, it was evident in her voice.  
“I hired you to catch her, Spencer. Not kill her. Poor thing.”  
She turned and looked at Rita, speared through the middle and whimpering.  
“I should’ve known not to send a man to do a woman’s job. You told me— no, _promised_ me —that you would be more careful after what happened with Je—”  
"She's still alive, chill out."  
Her voice was smooth and warm, even in anger. It was so familiar, but I couldn’t place it.  
“Barely! And what am I supposed to do with her if she dies before we get back? Make her into a fucking fur coat?”  
“Feed her to your cats. Not my problem.”  
I heard the keys in his hand jingle a half-second before the spotlights turned on, tearing away my cover of darkness and any hope I had in my tired heart. I held my breath and screams and anything sort of emotions I felt in that moment and remained motionless as Spencer walked across the street towards the new source of light, his car. How I kept it all in, I’ll never know. He must have turned on the headlights remotely, and now I could see everything. The key fob in Spencer’s hand. The look of pure ecstatic delight on his face. And the most earth-shattering thing of all? I could see who he was working for.  
The long blonde hair.  
The green eyes.  
The septum ring.  
The magic eight-ball print sundress.  
_Why?_  
_Out of all the things, all the people it could’ve been, why did it have to be her?_  
_"SPENCER!"_ she shouted, with the authority of an angry mother. Spencer stopped halfway across the street and turned around.  
“What do you want?”  
“I want you to show a little more respect, but I’ll settle for this.”  
The Collector walked up to Spencer and handed him a manila envelope as my mind tried to process the fact that I knew her.  
_I knew her._  
Then I realized that I was wrong. I only thought I knew her. Roger was right. No matter how much evidence he might’ve shown me, there was no way I’d have believed this without seeing it for myself. The person ordering Spencer around… the person collecting Gods… the person making my life absolute hell… the person I thought I knew my entire life… the person who was _supposed_ to be in a coma, in a care center somewhere... the person I loved… the person I would’ve given anything to see, to just hold in my arms again, just once… was Sabine. It was fucking Sabine.  
_Could I have stopped this? Was this my fault?_  
Spencer opened the envelope and thumbed through the cash.  
With a soft laugh, he said, “Damn, I almost forgot I get paid to do this.”  
Sabine twirled a stray golden lock of her hair around her finger.  
“You’ll find the information for your next target in there as well. This time around, you’d do good to try and leave more of it for me to collect.”  
“I’ll do what I can…”  
He glanced out into the trees. I couldn’t help but feel he was looking my way.  
“...Sabine.”  
The back of the moving truck slammed shut. Sabine got into her vehicle, followed closely by her clown-faced monstrosities. As they drove off, Spencer started back across the road to where his car waited.  
“Wow, what a gal.”  
He stuffed the envelope into his pants pocket and started whistling “La Vie En Rose."  
At the last moment, Spencer turned around, locked eyes with me, and winked. But it was just that, and nothing else. He wanted me to know he knew I was there. He wanted me to know he knew the whole time. He wanted me to know that he knew that he had just destroyed my entire world.  
His work here was done. He’d killed me without laying a single finger on me. He climbed into his Mustang and drove away, leaving me alone in the dark to cry quietly.


	2. Chapter 2

I made it back to the gas station, after a long night in the woods that I could barely remember.  
Rocco was sitting atop the garbage pile, gnawing on cardboard. When he saw me, he hung his head low.  
Almost like he was sorry for me. I started to laugh. I laughed until my sides hurt, and it eventually tapered off into a whimper.  
Then I flipped him the bird. He jumped down and raced back to his nest behind the grease trap.  
The grease trap. _The grease trap._  
We don’t sell hot food. We sure as hell don’t fry anything. Why the fuck do we have a grease trap? If not grease, then what the hell is in there?  
I put both hands on the black metallic bin and pulled. It didn’t budge. I pushed and heard a click. Once I released, the rectangular bin separated from the wall and rolled to the side, revealing half-empty rows of canned sodas. I pushed, and the entire cold drink case door swung open. I was dealing with a genuine secret passageway. I crawled through, pulled the fake door shut behind me, then went to find Jerry’s head. I just needed to talk to him, to hear his voice.  
First, I found not-Guillermo, sticking a gold-colored pin inside the plastic explosive over the front door.  
“Hey,” I said.  
He spun around.  
“Jack?! What?! Are… are you a ghost?”  
“Wish I was, wish I fuckin was.”  
“Oh… Wow. I was not expecting… You know what, man? I need to make a phone call.”  
While he dialed a number on his cell phone, I walked around the gas station to see that he’d spread the C-4 far and wide into every nook and corner like he was hiding Easter eggs.  
“Hey, it’s me. I don’t know how to tell you this, but… Jack’s here… I know right?! Me too… No, I asked. He says he’s not a ghost… Are we still going to… Okay… I’ll get on it.”  
He hung up, and then said “Well, shit.”  
“What’s up, robo-hands?”  
I laughed a high, hyena laugh. He glared at me, and I regretted it instantly.  
“Boss says I gotta help you clean up.”  
We spent the next hour prying off pallet boards and collecting plastic explosives. Then we rearranged the shelves, swept, mopped, changed the burnt-out lightbulbs, and bagged up all the debris.  
While we were at it, I found the ice chest where Roger’s man had left it in the walk-in. He explained that the smell was starting to get to him, and swore to me that he didn’t look inside. I told him I didn’t care if he looked. It was just Jerry, and Jerry was never shy. But if he really smelled that bad, I needed to take action. I replaced the water with sawdust and coffee grinds all the way up to his eyeholes. Before Roger’s man left I asked how sure he was that he didn’t forget any of the explosives. His hesitant answer of “pretty sure” inspired very little confidence.  
When he left, I pulled out the ice chest. I opened it. Jerry’s eyeless sockets stared back at me.  
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Tears began to flow freely down my face.  
“Jerry, something’s wrong. Something really _really_ bad has happened, and I don’t want to say it out loud, because if I do that makes it real and I don’t think I can handle that I can’t deal with that JERRY oh god I CAN’T DEAL WITH THIS.”  
“Okay dude, hold on, just calm down.”  
I pulled out one of the guns from under the counter.  
“Jack, Jack don’t do anything rash. Listen to me.”  
I put the gun to my temple and took off the safety.  
“IT’S NOT WORTH IT JERRY! IT’S NOT WORTH IT ANYMORE! NOT IF IT’S HER!”  
I bit my lip.  
“Oh god, Jerry, it’s her. It’s Sabine. Sabine is… Sabine is…”  
“You don’t have to finish that if you don’t want to Jack. Just put the gun down.”  
“Sabine is The Collector, Jerry. It’s Sabine, oh god, it’s my Beanie.”  
“Jack, we can talk about this. You’ve just gotta put the gun down. There are better ways to deal with what you’re feeling. Scream, break something, just don’t do that. I need you around.”  
His voice grew desperate.  
“ _Please_.”  
I felt my body shaking uncontrollably. I screamed and emptied the gun into the wall.  
“Okay. That’s good. Do… do you feel better?”  
“Not really.”  
“Listen. I know this is a hard thing to deal with. But you can get through this. I’ll be here the whole time.”  
I sighed and laid my head on the counter.  
“What am I gonna do?”  
“We’ll do something, man. Just take a breather.”  
I pulled my chair close to the counter and wrapped my arms around the ice chest.  
“Jerry?”  
“Yeah?”  
“I don’t know what I’d do without you.”  
“Neither do I, Jack.”

She was wearing a dark blue sundress and flip flops when she came into the gas station that night.  
Her silky blonde hair was brushed out like spun gold. Her pale, freckled skin shone.  
“Jack,” she said, in that beautiful, smooth voice of hers.  
For a moment, I couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eyes. And then I did.  
She was just as radiant as always. The hot tears stung my eyes as they made puddles on the counter.  
“Beanie,” I said softly.  
She reached over the counter and took my hand. It was warm. It was familiar. I hated it.  
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I told her. I meant it. Not here, about to ask me for the gas station. It wasn’t supposed to be her. God, why did it have to be _her?_  
“You’re not supposed to be here either,” she replied.  
“Where else can I go?”  
“Jack… this has been long overdue. We should run away together. You and I. For real this time. No unplanned obstacles. Ditch this crummy gas station and this crummy town.”  
I smiled.  
“That sounds really nice, Sabine.”  
“Just give me the deed to the gas station, and I’ll take care of all of it.”  
I almost told her yes. I wanted so badly to. Part of me didn’t care if she was the goddamned Devil. I just wanted my Sabine back.  
But part of me was telling me that my Sabine wasn’t ever coming back, that she’d never existed. And there was that voice in my head that was telling me to tell her no.  
The one that sounded like “C’mon dude, tell her no! Tell her she can’t have the gas station for anything!”  
I listened.  
“I wish I could Sabine. I really wish I could. But it’s not that easy anymore.”  
She sounded hurt.  
“Why?”  
“Well… Well, we don’t sell fresh cookies here, Sabine. We never have. You know that, and the fact that you tried to pull that on me is almost insulting. Why would we have cookie dough? We’re not a restaurant, and we don’t fry anything, so why do we have a grease trap? Some things don’t make any sense in this town. You don’t make sense. Who even are you? Who are your parents? What have you not told me?”  
I was shaking.  
Her reaction was not one I’d been expecting.  
She hung her head. Her voice was weak and sorrowful.  
“Jack, do you really wanna do this?”  
“No. I don’t want to. But I don’t have a choice.”  
“You do. You do have a choice. We can run away together. We can escape this doomed planet together and live out the rest of your days in happiness. You don’t have to worry about any of this mess.”  
She squeezed my hand tightly and looked into my eyes pleadingly.  
“As nice as that sounds, I can’t do that to my friends.”  
Sabine looked back up at me, rolling her eyes. She looked different. She took her hand from mine. The cruelty was seeping out of her, and the beauty I’d seen in her for so long was beginning to melt away. Her once-vibrant green eyes looked cold.  
“Which one? Your cop mom? The femme lesbian who won’t shut up about dogs? Or the gay stoner who’s got the hots for you?””  
“All three of them, I think— wait, what was that last thing you said?”  
She laughed and hopped up on the counter.  
“Oh Jack. Still as oblivious as ever. Never change.”  
She kissed my forehead. It burned. I watched her pull a glass of red wine out of… well, _absolutely nowhere_. She took a long sip, then a deep breath, then said.  
“You got me, J.”  
Something in me screamed in agony and died.  
I nodded as fresh tears poured down my cheeks. I kept my finger on the trigger of the gun in my pocket.  
“I don’t suppose you feel like telling me everything, do you?”  
“Why not? I’ve got some time to kill, and it’s lovely seeing your pretty face.”  
That’s when I realized the gun in my hand wasn’t a gun at all. I pulled it out and confirmed my suspicion— I was actually holding a garter snake. It bit my thumb, slipped from my grip, and slithered away.  
“What the hell?”  
She laughed as she took another deep sip of wine.  
“That’s just a little trick I learned from one of my collected. Good for entertaining people at parties, but not so useful when it comes to escaping.”  
She tossed her empty wine glass into the air, where it turned into a dove before flying into the window and falling to the ground with a broken neck. I felt like there was a metaphor in there somewhere.  
“This place. Jack, do you have any idea how long I’ve been stuck here? I’m trapped, just like you.”  
“I don’t understand. You’ve been trapped here? How come I haven’t seen you?”  
“You have, haven’t you? Up until the ‘accident’. And when you lost your leg?”  
“Why do you say it like that?”  
“Because it wasn’t an accident at all, Jack. I needed time to work. You couldn’t be there for that. You’d have just been a hindrance. So I orchestrated it all.”  
Cold anger flooded through me.  
“Besides that, I’m good at slipping in and out of shadows. That’s what my kind does. I’m a prisoner. That’s what this town is, Jack. It’s a fucking prison. It’s punishment for beings like me.”  
“What do you mean, Sabine?! What are you?!”  
She leaned forward and looked me in the eyes.  
“I was a princess once, long ago. My parents started a war they shouldn’t have. It cost them everything. I was their everything. So they took me away. Our world was destroyed. Our people wiped out. And I was sent here to punish them. Something worse than just killing me, something worse than death. As you may have heard, there is an ancient evil destined to destroy this place. It’s only a matter of time before it wakes up, and everything in its presence will suffer untold horrors. That’s why I’ve been doing everything I can to escape before it’s too late, to find my parents.”  
“Does ‘everything you can’ include killing my friends?”  
She smiled. It was dark, and it was ugly.  
“Always so clueless and naïve, J. I can’t hurt you. That was part of the punishment. If I had enough power to hurt you, I’d have enough to get off this stupid fucking planet. My power was stripped away, save for a little magic here and there.”  
“Why did you kill my friends, Sabine?!”  
“Sure, I hired Doctor Howard and Spencer to do my bidding. I knew of their predisposition to such behavior. But I wasn’t responsible if they acted upon it, was I? I never specifically ordered them to do any of it, to kill anyone.”  
“That sounds like a bullshit technicality.”  
“Clever, right? I figured it’d be something you’d appreciate.”  
She reached for my hand. I snatched it away.  
“What about everyone you replaced?”  
“I didn’t ‘replace’ them. I gave them an upgrade! I make better versions of them. I can make them indestructible. And if they were to pledge their loyalty to me, to attack and kill for me, well, that’s the problem with free will, hm?”  
“You’re just turning them into monsters and mind-controlling them. That isn’t free will, that’s manipulation and weaponization.”  
“You’re so smart, Jack, so sweet. I wish so badly I could’ve had you on board from the start. I couldn’t recruit you, though. Your brain just isn’t right for it. Just like Spencer’s isn’t. You’re both damaged canvases.”  
Hearing Sabine talk to me like this was making me want to throw up.  
“Bean, I appreciate your honesty. But why are you telling me all this? I feel like you should know better than to reveal the master plan. You’re smarter than that.”  
She chuckled.  
“Maybe I just felt like getting it off my chest. Maybe I feel like you deserve to have your head above water, if only for a little while. But it doesn’t matter. By the time I leave the building, you won’t remember a thing. When I come back inside in five minutes, you’ll happily agree to give me the gas station and run away with me. It’ll be perfect.”  
“Well, as long as you’re planning on wiping my memory, can I finally get an answer as to why you want this dump so bad? I mean, you’ve been around here. You know how much it sucks.”  
“I don’t, Jack. You of all people should know that. This place smells like a demon’s taint. What I want is the ground beneath it. The soil that grew the hand plants. You see, those roots are what I need to create my own army from nothing. No more collecting humans one at a time. I can just grow them from scratch. And once I finally have enough power, I’ll destroy Roger for making my existence a living hell. And then I’ll let my children do whatever they want. What they want is to upgrade the rest of the world. At the end, everyone will love me, obey me, _worship_ me… or they will perish. I will be a _queen_. You can be my king.”  
She let out a soft chuckle.  
“And with the combined power of this entire planet, I will finally be strong enough to tear a hole through time and space and escape this active volcano before it erupts and find my fucking parents. And we’ll go together and live happily ever after. I owe it all to you, J. Without your little blog? I would have never known where to look. Thank you, baby.”  
Sabine caressed my cheek and kissed my lips. It felt like ice. She hopped off the counter, signaling the end of this overwhelming information dump. She held her hand in front of my face, and with a malicious grin, she snapped her fingers.  
I began to feel myself slip into the void. Then a voice crashed out of nowhere and everywhere at the same time.  
“Jack no, don’t go! Stay awake! Stay awake man, don’t let her do this to you! Please! Please, oh god! Man I.. I love you, and I don’t want you to go with her! I love you, dude!”  
I couldn’t place the voice, but it was warm and familiar. I loved that voice back, whoever it was. I was sure of it.  
I blinked a few times, and everything came back into focus. Her grin disappeared.  
She snapped again, and again. I felt like I had ribs of steel. I felt more awake than I ever had in my life. My heart was pounding.  
“Sabine, honey, why are you West Side Storying me?  
“Why are you still… why are you still awake?”  
“Oh Sabine. Sweet, clueless, naïve Sabine. You’ve forgotten?”  
She swallowed and snapped again, harder than before. Her eyes widened with worry as the realization hit her. She’d said it herself. My brain was messed up. Now we knew just how much. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t get my memory wiped.  
“It’s not gonna work, baby. We both know that.”  
“Yeah. I uh…”  
“You’ve just revealed an awful lot of really important secrets.”  
Sabine took a step back.  
“Yeah I… I sure did, didn’t I?”  
“Including the fact that you can’t hurt me. So there’s no possible way you can keep me from knowing this information, hm?”  
She took another step back.  
“Yeah, I am very aware that I totally screwed the pooch on this one.”  
“You know, Sabine, I really can’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t kill you now.”  
The words felt like knives as they left my mouth. But I knew they were true. Sabine was gone. I’d never had her in the first place. Not the one I’d known. Not the one I’d loved. I felt numb to this Sabine.  
Her eyes grew large and filled with tears.  
“J, please. Please don’t do this. I love you. I want to be with you. It’s so easy. Just let me go. Just give me the gas station.”  
I shook my head.  
“That’s not going to work.”  
I reached my shaking hand into the receipt drawer and grabbed the spare gun. As I pointed it, Sabine waved her hand. The gun transformed into a lizard, which I promptly lobbed at her head as hard as I could. As it bounced off her face, I grabbed the next thing in arms reach, the same book I’d been reading when she came into my hospital room. I threw it at her, and she waved her hand. It turned into a cluster of green and yellow butterflies. I grabbed Ricardo and jumped across the counter. She waved her hand at me, and the bat turned into a meter-long king snake. I clutched the tail with both hands, whipped it over my head a couple times to get it up to speed, and whipped Sabine across the face hard enough to send her sprawling to the ground.  
The whole time I repeated the phrase “this isn’t your Sabine” in my mind over and over.  
The snake hardened back into a baseball bat. The book fell out of the air and slammed to the ground. Presumably, somewhere in the walls, a hamster transformed back into a handgun.  
“Oh god, Jack! I love you! Please, have mercy!”  
My resolve was quickly crumbling. Hot tears stung my eyes and trickled down my face.  
“I wish I could have mercy on you. I wish you were the Sabine that I could say ‘I love you too’ to. But you’re not.”  
I swung the bat down as hard as I could. Sabine blocked it with her arm and screamed in pain when it connected. Hearing her scream like that was a knife twisting in my gut. I could feel the bone break before pulling the bat up for another swing. All I needed was a clear shot at her head.  
_God, what was I thinking? Was I thinking about killing Sabine? What the fuck was wrong with me?_  
She used my momentary lapse in nerve to crawl backwards to the door. I went to take a step but froze. Sabine laughed, just out of my reach. I looked down and saw what she was laughing at.  
My new leg was gone, replaced with an oversized anvil.  
I tried pulling free, but it was attached to the skin. Sabine stood, brushed herself off, twirled, and declared, “I guess we’ll both live to fight another day, darling.”  
I chucked Ricardo at her like a spear, but it turned into a purple balloon with an eight-ball on it halfway to its destination and floated to the ceiling. As she left, she chirped, “I’ll be back, you know. Of course you know that, Jack. When you see me again, I’ll have friends with me. And you’re coming with me, whether you like it or not.”  
A moment later, my anvil-leg returned to its original form. I caught Ricardo as soon as he turned back into a bat and fell from the ceiling. I sat against the counter and cried for a while. And then I started to search for where my guns had scurried off to.  
When I found them, I went back behind the counter and sat down.  
“You saved me, didn’t you Jerry? It was you who said that and kept me out of it.”  
I shook the ice chest just a bit.  
“... Yeah Jack, it was me.”  
I nodded.  
“I feel the same way.”  
“You… you do?”  
I swallowed.  
“I guess there’s not much we can do about it now. But yeah.”  
“Jack, go drink some water. Wash your face. I think you need it.”  
“Yeah, okay.”

An hour later, the lights cut out. I guess the electric company was being serious when they said “Final Notice.”


End file.
